Last week, the winning design for the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, PA was announced. Dubbed the Crescent of Embrace – the site will include an arc of red maple trees and 40 wind chimes for each of the victims of the 9/11 flight.
I’ll be the first to concede some people’s feathers tend to get a tad bit ruffled when you combine symbolism with the tragic events 4 years ago.[ul][li]Sometimes we see things that were never intentionally there.Other times, we begin to disagree when overt or subliminal political messages have wormed their way into a memorial site.[/ul] Reasonable people can always agree to disagree, but I’m beginning to get a strong impression that news outlets, conservative editorial writers and conspiracy theorists are on to something that isn’t going to go away. [/li]
Frankly, I don’t give a ‘flying’ fuck if CAIR spokesman Rabiah Ahmed likes the design or not. True, he’s correct when he states, “Muslims died too (and) Islam, as a religion itself, was hijacked on 9/11." But the four twisted Muslims who went down on Flight 93 that day aren’t getting a wind chime - And won’t end up with symbol - whether inadvertent or not - of their twisted beliefs enshrined on that field.
Call the opponents of the approved Murdoch design jingoistic, xenophobic nut jobs if you must – I’m sure they’ve been called a whole lot worse – by a whole lot better. It’s time the Dept. of Interior rejects this design – and tell the selection comittee to select from one of the other 1,010 proposals.
It’s a shape. A number of the victim’s families seem to like, so if the thought of a red semicircle bugs you that much just close your eyes and think of the Christian Coalition or something.
The OP’s first link required registration and the second yielded nothing except a myriad of pop-ups. So that leaves me with the conspiracy theorist.
So are the number of existing wind chimes including the hijackers in the casualty total?
By now, I’m inclined to think that we should have no memorials for any of this stuff anymore. Put a plaque on a building, or a big rectangular rock with names carved in it.
Every goddamn survivor, relative and well-wisher thinks that they should have some sort of input on what the memorial looks like. Or what the new building looks like, what the garden looks like, what the museum looks like. It’s been 4 fucking years and we haven’t broken ground on a new tower in NYC. Everybody is hand wringing and arguing that one design is stupid, the next design isn’t appreciateive enough, the museum won’t be PC enough or is too PC. The entire Empire State Building was built in just over a year, these SOBs can’t even stick one shovel in the ground after 4.
I’ve heard so much crybabying about this process that I am actually ashamed that I donated money to the Sept 11th fund, because some of these uppity jackasses may have benefitted from it.
Everyone involved, just shut your fucking pie holes, stop trying to memorialize everyone, and let’s get on with our lives.
It’s not a symbol of Islam, it was a symbol of the Ottoman empire, and besides, it was usually used in the form of a green or white crescent, not red. The Red Crescent exists only as a counterpart to the Red Cross, i.e. a humanitarian organization.
The leaves won’t be red year round will they? IANABotanist.
If I read the article correctly, the cresent shape is what the land does naturally right now. Well, it used to be a strip mine.
Hey. that Hollywood Bowl is nothing but a bunch of crescents. Hollywood bastards, they hate America.
Er, sorry. I know about the green and white, (Trees are green!) but I was trying to point out the part that some people would be upset about, (Red of blood?) and pointing out that the crescent is a symbol of Islam. While it is true it comes from the Ottoman empire, it is associated directly enough that the equivalent of the Red Cross is the Red Crescent.
Clearly, this symbolism was… well, not seen by the designers, or possibly anyone short of those who also see the devil in the smoke from the World Trade, but that’s clearly the part that upsets them.
